] This had a momentary effect
on the Creeks, and induced them for the time being to observe a kind of
nominal neutrality, though they still furnished bodies of warriors to
help the British and Cherokees.[8]

The latter, however, who were the nearest neighbors of the Americans,
promptly took up the tomahawk at the bidding of the British. The royal
agents among these southern Indians had so far successfully[9] followed
the perfectly cold-blooded though perhaps necessary policy of exciting
the tribes to war with one another, in order that they might leave the
whites at peace; but now, as they officially reported to the British
commander, General Gage, they deemed this course no longer wise, and,
instead of fomenting, they endeavored to allay, the strife between the
Chickasaws and Creeks, so as to allow the latter to turn their full
strength against the Georgians.[10] At the same time every effort was
made to induce the Cherokees to rise,[11] and they were promised
gunpowder, blankets, and the like although some of the promised stores
were seized by the Americans while being forwarded to the Indians.[12]

In short, the British were active and successful in rousing the war
spirit among Creeks, Cherokees, Chocktaws, and Chickasaws, having
numerous agents in all these tribes.[13] Their success, and the
consequent ravages of the Indians, maddened the American frontiersmen
upon whom the blow fell, and changed their resentment against the
British king into a deadly and lasting hatred, which their sons and
grandsons inherited. Indian warfare was of such peculiar atrocity that
the employment of Indians as allies forbade any further hope of
reconciliation. It is not necessary to accept the American estimate of
the motives inspiring the act in order to sympathize fully with the
horror and anger that it aroused among the frontiersmen. They saw their
homes destroyed, their wives outraged, their children captured, their
friends butchered and tortured wholesale by Indians armed with British
weapons, bribed by British gold, and obeying the orders of British
agents and commanders. Their stormy anger was not likely to be allayed
by the consideration that Congress also had at first made some effort to
enlist Indians in the patriot forces, nor were they apt to bear in mind
the fact that the British, instead of being abnormally cruel, were in
reality less so than our former French and Spanish opponents.[14]

Looking back it is easy to see th